Books: Bowie Takes a Bow

There have been almost as many books on David Bowie as there were twists and turns in the chameleonic singer’s career.

In no particular order, we’ve had the Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield’s On Bowie; Nicholas Pegg’s unblushingly titled The Complete David Bowie; Paul Morley’s formidably brainy mixture of biography, memoir and cultural theory The Age of Bowie; and the authoritative (and occasionally gossipy) Bowie: The Oral History by Dylan Jones.

There are lavishly illustrated volumes that analyse Bowie’s brief 1970s residency in Berlin. Some linger over his excursions in the theatrical and art worlds. Others chart his metamorphosis from a more-or-less conventional south London boy with dodgy teeth into the space-invader rock star.

That star once enlivened Top of the Pops by performing a song about an alien, while wearing a multicoloured jumpsuit, with his arm curled limply round his tinfoil-clad guitarist’s back.

There are now books about Bowie’s books, which reveal that his home library included everything from a well-thumbed copy of The Iliad to a bound collection of the Beano. Modesty should forbid but, back in the Dark Ages, there was even a supposedly definitive biography called Loving the Alien by a character named Sandford, but we needn’t dwell on that.

A common theme running throughout almost all the Bowie bibliography has been an obsession with its subject’s so-called imperial phase.

That began with the song ‘Space Oddity’, released, with impeccable timing, just nine days before man walked on the moon in July 1969. It came to an end with the throwaway album Tonight in September 1984.

Now the British author Alexander Larman has bucked the trend by writing about the years during which the Thin White Duke returned from creative and near-literal death (Bowie suffered a series of heart attacks while on stage in June 2004).

It continues up to the moment he released his final studio album, Blackstar, in January 2016 – ten years ago – just 48 hours before he succumbed to liver cancer at the age of 69.

As Larman says in the introduction to his book, ‘“Lazarus” is, if you will, the pensive B-side to the triumphant A-side of Bowie’s heyday.’ That just about sums it up.

Larman writes of Bowie’s recorded swan song: ‘It seems particularly extraordinary that a man who could record something as pointless as [2003’s] ‘Fall Dog Bombs the Moon’ as a mature artist could return more than a decade later with this exquisite, disturbing collection of songs.’

These words are relatively restrained compared with the critical effusions Blackstar garnered elsewhere. Whoever originated the line about the death of a once-popular artist (sometimes said to be Truman Capote) being a great career move was clearly on to something.

It’s a curious thing how we sentimentalise our late performers. With a few notable exceptions, the press treated Blackstar – and, by extension, Bowie himself – with a respect that was as exaggerated as, a month earlier, it would have been astonishing.

That minor quibble aside, Larman’s critical judgement strikes me as largely spot-on, and never less than perceptive.

His style is pithy, and his eye for anecdotal detail sharp. We get a good deal of enjoyable insight into the modern reality of making an album, the vacuity of record companies, the whims and caprices of individual musicians and, not infrequently, the squabbles about money.

Larman is on top form, too, when it comes to a proper assessment of Bowie’s often overlooked screen-acting career. He pays generous tribute to his subject’s roles in films such as Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence and Absolute Beginners.

He notes, ‘Bowie is so deep in self-parody as Jareth, the Goblin King in Labyrinth, that it’s a wonder his increasingly elaborate wigs and costumes don’t fall apart, so obvious is it that he’s having to restrain himself from laughing at the absurdity of the whole enterprise.’

This complex and often tragicomic story reads by turns entertainingly and movingly. In the former spirit, Larman quotes an internal memo circulating at Bowie’s record label EMI.

It details their reaction to his midlife crisis as a member of the aggressively non-commercial group Tin Machine:

‘… repetitive tunes … lyrics that preach … minimalist or no production [and] a distressing lack of radio-friendly singles’.

Not all the band’s external reviews were as good as that one. Set against this, Larman writes affectingly of the astonishingly productive final year of Bowie’s life, during which he seems to have accepted his medical diagnosis without a hint of self-pity.

At one point, Bowie’s cancer briefly went into remission. ‘Don’t celebrate too quickly,’ he calmly informed a colleague in the studio, before returning to work.

Larman’s tone here is similarly businesslike, without the least note of pathos or sentimentality, and all the more effective as a result. It would take a heart of stone to remain unmoved by his account of the mortally ill Bowie struggling and succeeding with his almost final breath to complete an album that was simultaneously a statement on the inevitable and a last flourish of his irrepressible creativity.

This may not be the elusive ‘definitive’ Bowie biography – nor does it claim to be. But it is a superbly-told tale of restless invention and perseverance, and ultimately of suffering and redemption, which may make it a more important thing altogether.

I doff my hat to the author.

Christopher Sandford is author of Bowie: Loving the Alien